At what SEO point should you splitone website into two?

Question: How narrow or wide can you go with your content theme overall? For example, if you work with two very different markets, say education and business, where what you offer each is significanlty different, should you have two subdomains or two domains? This comes up often when create releases that are linked to from the front page and only a portion of our audience would really care. I.E. higher ed could care less about what we’re doing in the business market. etc.

Question: If you don’t have frequent news, should you focus more on your blog? Or what? And should you go ahead a do your releases anyway, as infrequent as they may be?

Answer: I don’t think there is an issue with having news releases that serve different audiences. In terms of human traffic, people will just click on the ones that interest them, and ignore the others. In terms of Google, all of the new news will be good for you.

I don’t generally recommend that you split your website, unless the two areas are RADICALLY different. Splitting the site means a lot of management hassles, plus split link / PageRank authority etc. Finally, subdomains are not a good idea in my book because they are, to Google, essentially separate websites.

In terms of frequency, stick with a schedule you can live with. If you can only generate one news release per quarter, do that. The big advantage to news is syndication. So be sure to syndicate that news release using Pitchengine.com, PRLOG.org, etc.

A blog is a very useful instrument for SEO, and I highly recommend it. It adds freshness to the site, and it creates many easy opportunities for keyword-heavy SEO content.

About
Jason McDonald, Ph.D

Got a question? Click this link to email Jason or call 888-993-1122. Dr. Jason McDonald is founder and Senior SEO / Social Media Director of the JM Internet Group. He teaches the SEO training classes for the group, and therefore provides most of the SEO tips for this blog. His goal with this blog is to provide an easy 'one-stop shop' for the busy marketer looking for tips, tricks, and secrets on how to get to the top of Google and Bing for free using proven SEO tactics. When not dreaming up SEO tips, Dr. McDonald lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife, two dogs, a cat, four iguanas and twelve children (just kidding). Really you read down to the bio on this guy? Enjoy the blog.